If you get rid of the otters, the local sea urchin population will expand. Sea urchins will eat the roots of kelp, causing the rest of the plant to float away. Fish that formerly lived in the kelp forest will also leave. Hope you like eating sea stars.

Ivo Shandor:If you get rid of the otters, the local sea urchin population will expand. Sea urchins will eat the roots of kelp, causing the rest of the plant to float away. Fish that formerly lived in the kelp forest will also leave. Hope you like eating sea stars.

Ivo Shandor:If you get rid of the otters, the local sea urchin population will expand. Sea urchins will eat the roots of kelp, causing the rest of the plant to float away. Fish that formerly lived in the kelp forest will also leave. Hope you like eating sea stars.

And the Otter population will expand as well.

Why is it, that the most vehemently anti-naturalistic, anti-environmental capitalists see dollar signs every time they look at an undisturbed area, then complain and blame what already existed before they came to the area when their efforts to strip the area of it's value are successful?

It's long overdue," said Jim Curland, advocacy program director for Friends of the Sea Otter.

I've never met one single person who was a member of an organization called "Friends of the" anything that wasn't an insufferable douche bag. I'm not saying the two things go hand in hand as a matter of necessity. That's just been my experience.

Get it together, humans. You can't be both the lord and god of all creation, and then go around blaming a couple of sea otters for your annihilation of the fish. Aww, did things not turn out the way you wanted them to when you destroyed entire ecosystems for short-term gain? Maybe you should go kill some more animals and "manage" some more habitat to fix it. Since it worked so well the first time.

treecologist:So this was an indirect government subsidy that benefited a select group of business people by reducing competition.

Kinda sorta. Part of the relocation had to do with the fact that the urchin and abalone divers were the main ones illegally killing the otters. It was hoped that by moving the otters, they would establish themselves in another area, which would be outside the divers' legal grounds, and then both groups (otters and divers) would be happy. It would have been better, of course, to prosecute the divers who were killing the otters; the problem is that the otter population is so small and vulnerable that there were fears it would die off while the legal action was being taken. So the relocation was done as an alternative solution.

Of course, the otters like their own territory, because they want to be where the urchins and abalone are most abundant. So the state will have to do it the hard way, and aggressively prosecute the divers.